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When people come to a modern and contemporary art museum
I think that a lot of the things that they're hoping
to get out of it are implicit as opposed to explicit,
are experiential as opposed to pedagogical.
And these augmented reality experiences are designed
to engage visitors who are looking
for a more experiential museum visit, something that's
a little more participatory.
So we're here at SFMOMA today doing an augmented reality
game jam.
A game jam is a group of people who make games coming
together and making a game in a really limited period
of time, and play testing, which means actually going
into the galleries
and sharing prototypes with SFMOMA visitors.
Play testing is a really wonderful way for game
designers to get feedback on their games in real time
from actual visitors.
The thing that's great about the new AR tech
is that it sees and perceives space a lot more
of the way that the human eye does,
and it means you can actually place three
dimensional objects in space that then relate
to the objects that are in a gallery for example.
It's an opportunity
to bring the digital into the physical world,
and really kind of enhance,
add another layer of information.
The working title right now is "The Spirit
of Sculptures".
It's a response to three sculptures
in the British sculpture gallery.
We picked the sculptures because we thought they had
interesting shapes and also interesting backgrounds.
We did explore the meaning behind each artwork,
and also the intention of the artists
throughout their career.
And based on that, we created these sort of spirits
of the sculptures in VR
that you can only see through VR.
And they're playful and interactive, and so it's kind
of encourages the user, the player, to wander around
and look at the sculptures in ways they normally
wouldn't.
It made me think the museum was maybe trying
to use technology to make you look
at the art a little bit differently.
I was very frustrated with virtual reality
because I felt that it was isolating,
and I was trying to relate it back to the real world.
And I think AR is the really good answer for that.
I enjoy this idea of having the secret overlay,
something that only a few people know about,
that special Easter egg I think
makes the work better for the new generation.
Video games, and even more so, alternate reality games,
there is something that's so new,
and we need people to explore it just like there are
explorers in art trying out new concepts and ideas.
So the things that I was most excited about
with making this game, asymmetric gameplay, so having
two players that are having different experiences,
and integrating physical reality with alternate reality.
Player one has a box with four buttons on it.
They pick which button corresponds with the answer they
want to give on the card, and they press the button.
And that moves around an object on the screen
that player two is seeing.
They actually physically move the tablet around
in 3D space and collect a thought bubble.
The joy on people's faces when they're chasing
around the little bubble with the tablet
makes me really happy.
That's really more satisfying than I had expected
or anticipated.
It was really fun having me be able to dictate what
the person was doing to some degree.
And then at the end once they collected a certain number
of thought bubbles they get a poem on the screen which
both players can read and reflect on.
The audience here seems pretty receptive and playful.
Augmented reality has really hit a level of all time
pervasiveness with the advent of Pokemon Go,
but a lot of museums,
I think visual art museums in particular,
are very skeptical about how AR could be applied
within their galleries spaces.
I myself am also a little bit skeptical,
but I'm excited to experiment with the possibilities.
Artworks very much function as a window
to different worlds
and different perspectives and different realities,
and working with AR is exactly the same thing.
There really aren't that many instances of art museums
working with augmented reality
because the field of artist made video games is so new.
We haven't really seen artists partnering with arts
institutions to create work in this way.
Games, they've been an art form for, essentially,
forever, basically.
Our game actually does reflect somewhat on the Dada
history of kind of using games as a way
to open up your mind in a different way,
and create space for exploration which is really
what a lot of art work is about too.
Museums can be really coded places where people feel
like they have to behave in a certain way,
or think in a certain way, or even feel a certain way.
Play is a great way to get people to feel more
comfortable in museum spaces,
and to feel as if they have a little bit more agency,
or control, or room to experiment.
And I think, in so many ways,
it's the museum's job to invite curiosity,
and just play is just one of many, many ways
museums can do that.
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